I’ve googled this to death and am getting nowhere, so thanks to anyone kind enough to throw in their two cents! I’m finally building something to replace an aging PC. Too many multi media projects building up, and I just dread using it.
My question centers around how to get the best use of the storage. I’d like to get the most effective mix of performance and reliability from the 3 drives I’ve budgeted for (or even 4 if I employ RAID 1).
Without boring everyone over model numbers, it’s basically a quad core 6700 with 2 GB of RAM, probably not overclocked (except for maybe some experimenting out of curiosity), a decent (not extreme) graphics card w/2 DVI monitors, and a SATA DVD burner, all running under XP Pro.
The most grueling thing it will be used for is Adobe Audition, Premiere, Photoshop Elements, etc. I will also use it for a lab – experimenting with multi boot & other OS’s (like Linux), VM’s, the aforementioned overclocking, etc., but also as my general purpose PC (browsing, finance, mail, etc.) The lab part is more for my own education and curiosity.
I originally was thinking of a fast HDD (Raptor maybe?) for the OS, a 320 GB drive for apps, swap file, etc., and a deep storage drive to use for the finished material and misc. storage of large multi media files. Maybe even a RAID 1 for the deep store, just to keep the data safe, and performance shouldn’t be an issue for that function – even if I use it to serve video or audio (right?)
Haven’t really given much thought to partitioning, other than the swap file being on a different physical drive from the boot drive, and the scratch files being on a different physical drive than the swap file (maybe I could put it on it’s own partition on the deep store drive?) I’ve always had something like Executive Software’s Diskeeper to automatically keep drives defragmented.
I have quite a few high quality components already purchased. At it’s base level (CPU, RAM, GPU, etc.) this system should be plenty fast, so getting every possible ounce of performance is not a priority over data safety, but i am not going to go hog wild over data redundancy either.
Basically, I’m looking for strategies to make the system faster based on where different aspects of the system reside (OS, apps, data, scratch, SWAP, etc.), which function the Raptor should serve to get the most benefit from it’s speed (boot drive? apps?), and how to mitigate risk of the data (at some point I’m sure I’ll have outboard storage for backup – right now it’s scattered on optical discs, which are becoming a pain to manage). Thoughts?